The Project 2025 Sting
The campaign intervention Olympics are picking up speed. The 100m Sting is the latest event. It’s an undercover videotaping operation against the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. The operatives don’t explicitly assert that Project 2025 is campaign intervention masquerading as nonpartisan think tank analysis but all the blaring headlines suggest that it’s part of a plan to get President Trump reelected. The execution of it exposes a prima facie case, at least. Not that anything can or should be done about it. You can watch the video replay above. The sting part of the video is about 9 minutes and the rest of the clip contains an interview of one of the undercover operatives. It should make for a good classroom discussion piece regarding the political restrictions in 501(c)(3). That’s the short version of this post.
The whole thing lends evidence to the suspicion that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is all about campaign intervention. Listen and judge for yourself. But know this much first. Undercover sting operations are like pornography happening in a car crash. Car crashes are destructive and unfair, porn is destructive and sleazy. But it’s always hard to look away. And then afterwards you feel guilty and as if you need a shower. Hidden camera stings kinda make me feel that way and yet I can’t help watching.
American journalists disdain the undercover sting. Entrapping people into compromising positions or statements and then reporting the compromise as if the journalist had no hand in its manufacture just seems sleazy. The venerated 60 Minutes TV show used to be really good at it. I remember a story long ago about one of the 60 Minutes reporters using the N word and then secretly taping other people when they used it too. I bet there are seminars on the topic in journalism schools. CNN explained all that and then reported the results anyway. Along with a whole bunch of other American media, including the Associated Press.
The Centre for Climate Reporting, a nonprofit group out of the UK where reporters have fewer journalistic scruples apparently, set up one of Project 2025’s “primary authors” for an interview. Russell Vought was the mark. One media outlet describes him as a “dangerous authoritarian gunning to serve as Trump’s Grand Vizier.” Hardly. Just a conservative who probably would have thought Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher a RINO.
CCR targeted Project 2025 because, among other things, Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership can be described as a climate change denier’s playbook. The Mandate for Leadership treats all scientists and others who warn about climate change as atheist puppets of the Chinese Communist Party. Vought is described as a chief architect of Project 2025 who thought he was meeting with two people related to a wealthy conservative donor. CCR explains the rest:
Tom and Edward were not, in fact, relatives of a wealthy conservative donor. They were working undercover for the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) – one is an investigative journalist, the other a paid actor. In the moments before their guest arrived, they strategically placed cameras around the hotel suite. One went into a bag placed on the dark, wood floor; a second on a side table. Another sat discretely inside a reporter’s suit jacket. As the cameras rolled and the men laid out refreshments, the buzzer sounded. Their guest had arrived.
Russell Vought, with his clipped grey beard and glasses, looks more like an accountant than a MAGA radical. He is the founder and president of the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank he described to his hosts as “the Death Star,” which alongside the Heritage Foundation has been at the heart of Project 2025. The head of the Office of Management and Budget in Trump’s White House, he is known for his fierce dedication to the former president’s cause. He’s a frequent guest on War Room, a popular podcast for MAGA diehards hosted by Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon. He told the undercover reporters he’d had to miss an appearance on the show to be at the meeting.
For months, CCR has been investigating powerful populist movements, in the US and Europe, that have set themselves against action to tackle climate change. Trump himself has repeatedly dismissed the threat and sent a clear message to the fossil fuel industry should he win in November: “We’re going to drill, baby, drill,” he said last month. The architects of Project 2025 – which Trump has tried to distance himself from in recent weeks – call for the US to reverse Biden-era green subsidies and “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.” But our conversation with Vought covered far more than climate change. Over the course of nearly two hours, he revealed previously unreported details of the next, secretive phase of Project 2025.
Vought said he is overseeing the drafting of hundreds of executive orders, regulations and secretarial memos, to help make the US conservative movement’s radical goals a reality. These include plans for the “largest deportation in history” – a promise also made by Trump – and a proposal to use the military against US citizens to suppress large-scale protests in response. This will, Vought said, help to end multiculturalism in the United States.
Vought, who told the undercover reporters he had a deep relationship with the Trump campaign, even dismissed his former boss’s disavowal of Project 2025. He said his close relationship with Trump means that he can put these transition documents directly into his hands. “There are people like me that have his trust that will be able to get it to him in whatever position we’re at,” he said. “The relationships will be there. The trust level will be there.” Vought also pointed to the fact he was recently chosen as the policy director for the Republican National Convention’s Platform Committee, as evidence of the Trump campaign’s trust in him and his ideas.
Russell Vought with President Trump
darryll k. jones